While all interactive works reflect interactors
back to themselves, in many works the idea of the mirror is explicitly
invoked. The clearest examples are interactive video installations where
the spectator's image or silhouette becomes an active force in a computer-generated
context. Examples include aspects of Myron Krueger's Videoplace work, Ed
Tannenbaum's Recollections and Very Vivid's Mandala. The spectator sees
some representation of themselves on a video projection screen. This representation
follows the movements of the interactor like a mirror-image or shadow,
transformed by the potentials with which the artist has endowed the space.
These transformations are realized by software running on a computer. In
such work, the content is contained in this difference between the gesture
and its transformed or recontextualized reflection.

The myth of 'Echo and Narcissus', told
by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, provides an interesting context in which
to examine the question of reflections and distorted mirrorings. Echo was
a nymph who used to tell stories to Juno in order to distract her while
Jupiter consorted with the other nymphs. When Juno discovered Echo's deceptions,
she punished Echo by removing her ability to source words. She retained
only the ability to repeat back the last words said to her. And so, when
she saw Narcissus in the forest, and fell in love with him, she had only
his words of rejection to transform into an expression of her love. Like
Echo, the interactive artist transforms what is given by the interactor
into an expression of something other, making Echo a patron deity of interactive
art.

Later, in the most familiar part of the
story, Narcissus glimpses his image in a pool of water, and falls in love
himself. He does not initially realize that it is his own image, and falls
into despair that the youth in the pool does not return his love.19
Noting that the name 'Narcissus' is derived from the Greek word narcosis
(numbness), McLuhan writes

This extension of himself by mirror numbed
his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended
or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments
of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension
of himself and had become a closed system.20

The myth presents two kinds of reflection:
the perfect mirror-like, synchronous reflection of Narcissus in the pool
and the delayed and distorted reflections of Echo's speech. In the "Sounds"
chapter of Walden, Thoreau, describing the sound of distance church bells,
writes

The echo is, to some extent, an original
sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition
of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood;
the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.21

While the unmediated feedback of exact
mirroring produces the closed system of self absorption (the reflection
of the self is re-absorbed), transformed reflections are a dialogue between
the self and the world beyond. The echo operates like a wayward loop of
consciousness through which one's image of one's self and one's relationship
to the world can be examined, questioned and transformed.

In many of Krueger's Videoplace interactions
the interactor's image is the device through which the 'artificial reality'
is explored. The transformations of this silhouette are the keys to the
understanding of the world depicted on the video screen. The self-image
is the known reference against which the phenomena of transformation are
registered. In my own work Very Nervous System, a computer looks out through
a video camera, and gathers a sense of the physical gestures of the interactor.
These impressions are immediately translated into sounds or music, reflecting
and accompanying the gestures, thereby transforming
the interactor's awareness of his or her body. In both cases, the character
of the experienced phenomenon is discovered as a change in a representation
of the self.

The relationship between the interactor
and the transformed reflection is stereoscopic. When we look into a three-dimensional
space, each of our two eyes sees a slightly different image. What transforms
the image that the right eye sees into the image that the left eye sees
is a change in point-of-view. The tension that exists between these two
points of view is resolved by the brain into the revelation of depth. An
interactive artwork presents, in the form of the transformed reflection,
an image of the self from another point of view which likewise produces
a sort of stereoscopic tension.

Transformed mirroring is also found in
Tumbling Man by Chico MacMurtrie and Rick W. Sayre. In this work, participants
wear jumpsuits wired with sensors that detect the opening and closing of
elbow and knee joints and the lowering of the chin. This information is
used to control similar joints in a life-size pneumatic robot through a
radio link. The robot mimics the general posture of participants, but the
robot is carefully designed so that it doesn't follow the participant's
gesture's exactly. The robot's appendages are constructed of metal pipes
containing free-rolling metal balls, and the joints are intentionally loose.
This adds a rich complexity and indeterminacy to the movement of the robot,
enabling it to rock, heave and tumble with momenta derived from, but not
copied from, the movements of participants. Generally, two participants
work together, each with control over a changing fraction of the robot's
joints, resulting in movements that are a partial and shifting reflection
of both participants.22 An
additional level of interaction exists between the two participants as
they work together to gain some mastery over the robot. The robot arouses
strong empathy, on one hand as an eloquent reflection of the participants'
struggles, and on the other as a subject of domination by the participants.

The question of domination raises an important
issue. For many people, interaction has come to mean 'control'. People
look to interactive technology for 'empowerment', and such technologies
can certainly give the interactor a strong sense of power. This is clearly
the attraction of video games. In these games, the mirror transforms the
interactor's gestures largely by amplification, but what is actually offered
is the amplification of a gesture within a void, a domination of nothingness,
the illusion of power. In particular, this is a fantasy of power bereft
of responsibility. In the recent Gulf War, the video-game fantasy of power
was reconnected to the power of actual armaments. In the process, the sense
of responsibility was lost; the personal acountability of the pilots was
cleverly amputated, dissolved by the interface.

Interaction is about encounter rather than
control. The interactive artist must counter the video-game-induced expectations
that the interactor often brings to interaction. Obliqueness and irony
within the transformations and the coexistence of many different variables
of control within the interactive media provide for a richer, though perhaps
less ego-gratifying experience. However, there is a threshold of distortion
and complexity beyond which an interactor loses sight of him or herself
in the mirror. The less distortion there is, the easier it is for the interactor
to identify with the responses the interactive system is making. The interactive
artist must strike a balance between the interactor's sense of control,
which enforces identification, and the richness of the responsive system's
behaviour, which keep the system from becoming closed.

Because explicit interactivity is still
a relatively new feature in artworks, the audience often approaches the
works with scepticism. The audience requires proof that the work is interactive.
This seems like a reasonable expectation. In navigable work, establishing
the responsive character of the work is not difficult, but in works where
the character of the interaction is more complex, providing proof is not
always so easy. The proof that will most easily satisfy the audience is
'predictability' (i.e. if one makes the same action twice, the work will
respond identically each time). Unfortunately, this test only works for
simple interactive devices with no memory and no ability to adapt. More
complicated systems might perceive a repetition of an action as the establishment
of a pattern, and respond to this new quality in the behaviour of the participant
with a new kind of response.

I noticed an interesting pattern emerging
in the interactions between the audience and an early manifestation of
Very Nervous System. This version would, in fact, respond identically to
identical movements. People entered the installation, and set about verifying
the predictability of the system. They made a gesture, as a question to
the space, and mentally noted the sound that that gesture had made. They
repeated the gesture once or twice, again as a question, and got the same
result. The third repetition seemed to satisfy the participants that the
system was in fact interactive. The way they held their body and the look
on their face changed. They made the gesture again, this time as a command
to the system, not a question. The physical dynamics of the command gesture
was significantly different from the previous, more tentative questioning
gestures, and the system responded with a different sound.

The complexity of this relationship is,
in this case, not so much a function of the complexity of the system, but
of the complexity of the participants themselves. The system was not programmed
to interpret motivation, it merely reflected what it saw. The critical
point is that aspects of movement that might reflect motivation were not
filtered out. By increasing the amount of filtering that is applied in
the perceptual process that the interactive system employs, the designer
increases the reliability of the resulting information and therefore the
unambiguity of control, but at the same time, the richness of that information
is reduced.

Interactive technologies are hybrids of
communications media and control media. We don't expect to control someone
by talking to them on the telephone, except to the degree that a relationship
of control has been elsewhere established. We do expect to be able to control
the telephone itself, as well as our computers, our automobiles and our
smart bombs. But as our technologies evolve and become more complex, they
begin to exhibit human behaviour. For example, much current research in
the field of human computer interface is focussed on the the creation of
computer-simulated anthropomorphic 'agents' to whom the user can pose questions,
and assign duties. Our interactions with such agents begins to take the
form of communication, but the relationship is still intended to be one
of control. This relationship of control is desirable to the degree that
our technologies are extensions of ourselves. But these extensions are
not just enlargements of the boundaries of our autonomous individualities;
they are interfaces through which our contact with the outside world is
mediated. The interface becomes a containing environment; if control over
this environment is insisted upon, it becomes a system of insulation and
isolation from both otherness and ambiguity.

'Virtual reality' presents an interesting
context in which to examine this question. To the extent that 'virtual
reality' is intended as a technology for presentation or visualization,
its conventional control interface of DataGlove and Polhemus trackers are
quite adequate, and the lack of ambiguity appropriate. But the creators
of these systems dream of creating comprehensive, shared 'realities', in
which case we must question the 'philosophy' behind the interface. In 'virtual
reality' systems, the participant acts on and moves through the environment
with a few linear controllers. As the technology evolves, the visual renderings
grow increasingly 'real', but the relationship between the participant
and the reality remains simplistic. Our interface with the 'real' world
and with other people is complex and highly non-linear and, from a 'control'
point of view, very ambiguous. Interface designs appropriate for the cockpit
are not necessarily appropriate in our relationships with the world around
us.

Many interactive artists create their own
interfaces. Without the pressures and restrictions involved in getting
a saleable and reliable product 'to market', they are free to incorporate
a richer complexity and ambiguity into these interfaces. Myron Krueger
has been developing the interface technology for Videoplace for almost
two decades. Unlike virtual reality control technologies, primarily 'sensing'
technologies, his interface is a 'perceiving' technology. The Polhemus
and the DataGlove involve the sensing of a small number of essentially
unambiguous parameters. In 'Videoplace', the many thousands of individual
pieces of information making up a video camera's image are digested by
various processors that attempt to make some kind of sense out of what
the camera is seeing. Krueger has gone to great lengths to develop methods
that derive relatively unambiguous information from the image, but perception
is inherently prone to errors and ambiguity. It interprets what it senses,
and therefore exhibits something very much like subjective judgement. Because
such perceptual mechanisms are generally very complex, they often display
unexpected behaviours as well as those intended by their creator. In Artificial
Reality II, Krueger writes: "Indeed, one of the strong motivations guiding
this work is the desire to compose works that surprise their creator."23
This apparent contradiction between the desire for control and the desire
for surprises is common among interactive artists. James Seawright, one
of the earliest creators of interactive sculptures explained "My aim is
not to 'program' them but to produce a kind of patterned personality. Just
as a person you know very well can surprise you, so can these machines."24
An engineer might suspect that this expressed taste for surprises is a
cover for bad design. But an engineer's aims are different. Interactive
artist balance control and surprise to suit their 'interactive aesthetic'.

This desire for surprise rises partly out
of the nature of the medium. Computers are the greatest expression of man's
desire to control. They are a pure representation of authority. They are
constructed of the utterly unambiguous 'elementary particles' of presence
and absence, on and off, one and zero. Computers are a meta-technology,
almost infinitely flexible and bristling with potential. In the face of
this medium of absolute determination, artists often feel a kind of loneliness
or claustrophobia. Pushing the technology until it surprises is one way
of escaping from the numbing effects of staring deeply into your own constructions.
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